The mythology of freedom under today’s capitalism for the average person is a con job, which is rose-tinted and propagandized through sentimental patriotic fanfare, and through the corporate hijacking of the symbols and iconography of patriotism, freedom, self-determination, and the virtues of small, hometown free markets. The markets are, of course, not small or hometown or free. These propaganda constructs are control-illusions maintained by the myth-makers within the media and marketing departments of the borderless, multi-national, corporate states, which seek to maintain the hegemony of their corporatocracies by stimulating endless consumerism by any dark means necessary. The means and methods of mind control, manipulation, public relations, and propaganda have long been understood and employed, for example as with Edward Bernays through the psychoanalytical theories of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, who deployed the crowd psychology theories of Gustave LeBon and Wilfred Trotter. Among these accepted tools are using, cultivating, or amplifying fear and insecurity within the public’s emotions, to then provide a “solution.” This action, reaction solution paradigm is a master tool for manipulation, control, and conquest.
The character Arthur Jensen vituperates Howard Beale in the movie Network, with the following admonition about the dark economic and political realities of the world:
You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear? You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU… WILL… ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that… perfect world… in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
Today’s rabid corporate leviathans have very little to do with free enterprise or free markets, and they regularly decimate and lay waste to small towns, small businesses and their proprietors; often the very people who vehemently support and believe in the mythologies of freedom into which they have been indoctrinated from birth. Make no mistake; these so-called free marketplaces are not constructs of small town capitalism, where local producers and small businesses compete on a fair playing field, but more closely resemble a no-holds barred death match of competition. They are global battlefields of competition, where well-meaning, good and honest citizens are in fact working in direct competition with child slave workers earning pennies an hour. If you are competing with slaves, then you are a slave yourself. This sickness of the spirit, through extreme nationalism objectifies and dehumanizes those from other countries. The outrage of child labour would not be accepted within in the USA or Europe should it come to light, yet is acceptable in the name of commerce, because of geographical and cultural differences. Under predatory global capitalism, our real trade tariff, is our loss of morality for outsourcing production to developing nations, where sweatshop labor cheaply produces the goods we insatiably consume.
We have come to a low place, where it is somehow acceptable to outsource corporate and national-corporate losses through predatory monetary policy, exploitative child labor practices, and literal war engagements, which are all designed to subsidize the debts and losses created from a mindset of greed, selfishness, and the insanely unsustainable business models of unlimited growth forever. While this certainly seems to be the modus operandi of Western imperialism, especially as seen in America’s permanent war economy, it also seems every other diverse political construct on earth has its own unique way of subduing the spirit of higher consideration and cooperation. These mindsets, at home and abroad, must be considered part of a dark mental illness. There is a self-destructive program running in the consciousness of humanity, and we must write a new program.
The current programs are domination, greed, forced territorial expansion, hoarding, and resource appropriation for the advantage of one group, to the absolute exclusion of others. The ways we seek conquest and competitive dominance over others is violence against the high spirit of sharing, cooperation, and human commonality. Our illness arises out of the perverse need for competitive gain, even if it means taking advantage of others through marginalization, passive violence, and violation of universal human rights. At its extreme height, our dark lust for competitive domination leads us to complicit acts of murder from-a-distance, through tax-supported militarism in often unnecessary wars. At its least vulgar manifestation, we simply see presence of basic unfairness that certainly could be creatively improved upon.
The greatest problem with capitalism as an economic system is when the privately owned means of production are operated solely for profit, and only within the battlefield of a competitive market. A kinder system of commerce, which has no name and is yet to be invented by the ingenious human mind would be more helpful to human beings, by considering a true profit to only be that production which benefits the greater good of all, to some degree, and cooperation to be a higher moral principle than competition. This is of course not solely a problem with capitalism itself, but with human nature. It is therefore the consciousness of the individual that must be elevated and expanded to a greater scope of compassion, commonality, kinship, and cooperation. We must rethink our present concepts of difference.
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